The Dead Files (2011) s02e13 Episode Script

Starvation Heights

She was lost and scared.
I'll hear my name being called.
I got grabbed.
Her head's, like, just.
.
If you came under her spell, you did what she said.
These people were absolutely terrified and desperate to get out.
And she was up there.
- It's a horrible death.
- Not a good way to die.
I can't help you unless you tell me the truth.
They're collecting the dead.
Oh, my God, it's so awful.
There's something down there.
My name is Amy Allan.
A lot of dead people are here.
I see dead people.
This is not good.
I speak to dead people.
.
He is very pissed off.
And they speak to me.
.
The house is angry.
But there's only one way to know if my findings are real.
He's killed people.
I rely on my partner.
I'm Steve Di Schiavi.
I'm a retired New York City homicide Detective.
.
He got shot at his house? And I know every person, every house, has secrets.
Aren't you terrified, being here? It's my job to reveal 'em.
That sounds like something out of "The Exorcist".
But Steve and I never speak.
.
We never communicate during an investigation.
Until the very end.
It's bad.
And we uncover if it's safe for you to stay.
.
I'd like some answers.
Or time to get out.
Amy and I never cross paths during our investigations.
I focus on research, interview witnesses, and uncover secrets from the past.
At the end, we come together to reveal our findings to our clients and each other.
I'm in Olalla, Washington, about an hour out of Seattle.
I'm headed over to meet a teenager named Logan.
He says there's a lot of strange stuff going on in this house, and he thinks his family's in danger.
He sounds pretty shaken up, so we're gonna see if we can figure this out for him.
Before Amy enters a location, I have to clear the area of anything that could influence her findings.
This home has a lot of family photographs, so it's important that I take my time to cover or remove them all.
There's this lady who wanders around.
Her face and all her teeth are, like, bashed in.
Oh, it's such a mess.
Like, it's all nasty and bloody and, like.
.
It's awful.
So, Logan, it's rare that Amy and I get called in by somebody so young.
How old are you? I'm 18.
Okay.
Um, what's going on that you need us to come in and investigate? Well, I've heard whispering, and I've been seeing things since I've been young and lived here, over in the other house.
Okay, so that other house I passed when I drove up - is.
.
You used to live there? - Yes.
I had some friends over, and we went to the other house and did a séance, and we tried to communicate with the spirits and kind of talk to 'em, but.
.
I'm afraid that I set something in motion that I don't understand, and I called you guys here because I'm hoping you can put a stop to it.
Okay, is there anyplace in this house you can show me in particular? Downstairs, if you want to follow me.
This is where I hear a lot of the whispers.
Okay, explain the whispers to me.
The whispers sound like a crowd of people.
It sounds like it's really up close, and they're all trying to talk to you at once, and then sometimes, while I'm laying here trying to sleep, I'll hear my name being called.
- So does it keep you up? - Yes.
It just goes all night.
There's a lot of yelling, and I also see a lot of bodies on the ground.
I feel like a lot of death.
Dead people are attracted here and kept here.
This person gets fixated, like a collector gets.
.
It's kind of like they're collecting the dead.
So, Logan, this is the house you used to live in? Yes.
This is the room where I did the séance.
What'd you guys do? For our séance, I had a couple of my friends over, and we.
.
We came in here and just sat in a circle, and it was night, so it was really dark.
We couldn't see.
We started asking questions and tried to communicate with the spirits and see if we could get some sort of a response.
Anything happen? We got scratching on the floor.
We heard footsteps.
One of my friends had gotten shaken.
What happened? She shook and just fell to the ground, and she was crying, and we were trying to figure out what happened to her, and just.
.
She said that she had gotten shaken from behind.
And there was nobody else around to do that, like, to play a joke on her? No.
And this was the first time you did a séance? Yes.
- You sure? - Yes.
I did have a couple more after that, though.
How many more? I kind of lost track.
I think I did ten.
As a former NYPD Detective, I can tell when a witness is withholding information.
So, Logan, let me get this straight.
You did ten? Somewhere around 10, 15 séances.
Logan, you told me you did one séance.
Then you told me you did ten.
Now I got you to tell me you did 15.
I can't help you unless you tell me the truth.
So what's the number? I've done 17 séances.
- You're sure about that? - Yes.
You might have bit off more than you could chew.
- You understand that, right? - I do now, yes.
You said someone is collecting the dead.
How would they do that? I think that.
.
That if they are, then it'd probably be, like, some form of communications.
.
And this is inadvertently holding them there.
This is the (Bleep) that (Bleep) pisses me off.
I get very angry when the living communicate with the dead for their own amusement.
How do you like that? You like that, huh? Oh, why don't you talk to me, why don't you talk to me? Come on in.
Talk to me.
I feel like someone is tormenting the dead here and the dead are trapped because of it.
Bad.
I get very angry about this (Bleep).
I'm just (Bleep) sick of it.
I'm disgusted.
Disgusted.
It's not a (Bleep) game.
They should just tear this (Bleep) down.
They should just tear this (Bleep) down.
- That's what they should do.
- Why? Because this is like a place for dead squatters, and this is inadvertently holding them there.
So it's trapping them? Yeah, but it's not just.
.
The house.
The living people are doing it, too.
So, Shane, I spoke to Logan, and, um, I was wondering, have you had any experiences here? I never did, no.
I really haven't experienced anything out here.
- Do you believe Logan and his friends? - I do.
You can tell, when something happens, they're upset about it.
- Okay.
- You know, and it.
.
It affects them.
All right, so you don't think they're making any of this up? - No, no.
- Okay.
What do you know about the property? We've heard that, uh, that there was a Dr.
Hazzard that set up shop out here, and that she had, uh, done some pretty terrible things to people.
Uh, there's these, like, victims.
Uh, victims of.
.
Of terrible people.
And then, like, back here, there's, like, this space that's, like.
.
Like, for.
.
For the bad people who, like, killed people.
It's awful.
So did you build this place or did somebody else? My wife and I built this house, and we wanted to incorporate some of the old house into it, and so we took pieces like the bannister from next door and brought it all over here as one unit to put in the new house.
Did Logan stop having experiences when you guys moved? At first, nothing really happened, but as time went on, it seems like more events have occurred.
Shane, I gotta ask you, as a Father myself, I mean, how do you feel about what Logan did as far as the séances go? All right, you know he did 17? I had no idea that it was that many.
How do you feel about the paranormal? You know, I'm a skeptic, but certainly, there's something going on that's affecting my family.
There's, like, somebody screaming.
- Male or female? - Female.
She's screaming, and there's, like, chaos.
Aah! What the (Bleep)'s going on? It's, like, so much pain.
It's so much pain.
It's so much (Bleep) pain.
What is? This dying.
And I'm hearing crackle, pop, crackle, pop, and then it.
.
Her head's, like, just.
.
She's going higher to get away.
She fell down.
.
And broke her face open.
She does the face thing, like, her face is all busted and bloody and nasty.
And she was up there.
She goes in and out of the wall a lot.
So, Lori, I spoke with your husband and Logan.
Logan, in particular, seems to think he might have stirred some things up - that might not be so good.
- Mm-hmm.
Sometimes he does feel that way, and when he's got a whole group of.
.
Of teenagers together, they get scared.
Now one of his friends, he told me, uh, had an incident where she got.
.
- Touched.
- Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that did concern me, and so I told him that maybe he was bothering spirits or ghosts, and maybe he should stop doing that.
What about you? Have you seen anything? I have had experiences, yeah.
Okay, so do you think anything here could cause you guys any harm? I think the boys think that sometimes, but I don't.
The dead lady from the other house, who likes to show her blood and gore.
.
She does have a plan.
Her plan is, make her jump or fall down.
The angry woman with the broken face is out for blood.
I think she's plotting against a woman who lives in this house.
Serious, uh.
.
I don't know how she exactly wants to execute this plan.
I think she wants to do her the same way that she did herself.
Make the.
.
The living person.
.
F.
.
Fall down.
Why? Why does she want to do that? She feels that this living person is her obstacle to leaving.
Is she right? Yes.
This is a freaking war.
Both Logan and his Mom Lori mentioned a girl who had a pretty frightening experience during one of the séances.
.
So I'm going to meet with her and get a firsthand account of what went down.
Logan was telling me you attended a séance with him.
Yeah.
He has friends come over every once in awhile, and we turn off all the lights and we wait until we hear something.
All right, but something happened one night.
Oh, yeah.
I got grabbed in my back.
Immediately, I blacked out and fell to the ground and almost hit one of the kids who was laying on the ground.
They all picked me up.
I don't remember walking.
I think they all carried me outside.
Somebody wasn't playing a joke, I hope.
No.
There was no one behind me at all.
Getting pushed.
I'm getting pushed.
It hurts, it hurts.
I'm getting.
.
Shoved in my back.
Logan's done a lot of séances there.
Do you think he's playing with fire? Yeah.
The mood changes every time we go there.
Some days, it's very, very dark and you can feel it's heavy the moment you walk in.
You're sad and you.
.
You don't feel hope.
- Would you ever go back there? - No, never.
Ok.
- Careful, careful, careful.
- Oh, jeez.
Weird, I thought this went further back.
I'm seeing a room here.
It's kind of feeling like it might be, like, a doorway, like, a vortex.
Okay.
Whoever's been attempting to contact the dead here may have opened a gateway to the other side, and this can be very dangerous.
It's drawing more, um.
.
Bad, uh.
.
Dead people.
Shane mentioned a Dr.
Hazzard who did terrible things to people on his property.
.
So I'm going back to his house to meet with a local author who says he's gonna give me the real story.
This place was known as starvation heights.
Dr.
Linda Burfield Hazzard lived here about a century ago.
She had this theory that if she could fast you down, that's taking you down to skin and bones, she could then build you back up to perfect health.
Basically, uh, she was starving you.
Did she, like, feed them at first, and then just cut 'em off? How'd she do it? She started them on this fast immediately, which was asparagus broth, water.
They didn't get any food for about 40 days.
Lots of people died here, and a lot of people tried to get away.
I mean, people that lived in Olalla at the time talked about seeing these starving people.
.
They called 'em skeletons.
.
That were walking out, um, into the woods or to a neighbor's house to try to get food.
I mean, these people that came here were absolutely terrified and desperate to get out.
Okay, so how many people wound up dying under her care? Between 20 and 40.
There's just too many people here that are just straight up in their death state.
When someone dies in a traumatic or violent way, they can be trapped in what's called the death state.
It's too much (Bleep) pain.
A lot of pain, these people.
So, Gregg, what did Dr.
Hazzard do up here? There's three things to her treatment.
The fast, she's doing a massage so vigorous that it hurts you, okay? You're getting pummeled, and the last thing is the enema.
She's giving you an enema that's gonna last you eight hours.
Is this where she kept patients? This bedroom up here is where she kept her two most famous patients.
Claire and Dora Williamson were these spinsters from England that had a lot of money, so they came here for the treatment.
Okay, so what would wind up happening? One was able to smuggle out a cable through a staff person or somebody to get their nurse from when they grew up to rescue them.
- Somebody finally came? - Somebody came, but they came too late.
- Claire had already died.
- Okay.
That's how they were able to try Dr.
Hazzard for murder.
- What did she do with the sister's body? - She did the autopsy here.
She marked down that Claire had died of cirrhosis of the liver, like she did on a lot of cases, and then she shipped her over on a private boat over to Seattle, to the mortuary.
Here's what Dora looked like before.
.
And here's what she looked like by the time she was rescued.
Oh, my God.
She weighed 38 pounds.
Dora talked about how Dr.
Hazzard suggested that she kill herself, so there's also the idea that maybe she hastened a few people to the grave by suggesting suicide.
Where's the woman who fell down the stairs? She, like, walks back and forth and back and forth.
She comes all the way over, and then she just.
.
Pfft.
She felt pressured.
She felt intimidated.
She might have jumped off the stairs.
She was.
.
Lost and scared and.
.
Confused and.
.
She jumped because.
.
Somebody was gonna kill her anyways.
I'm heading over to the old funeral parlor in Seattle where this quack Doctor took her dead patients.
I'm meeting with a forensic pathologist to find out what kind of suffering these poor people went through as they starved to death.
So, Doc, what is this place? We're in what was the original funeral parlor where Linda Hazzard would bring the bodies from Olalla.
Now she had patients that eventually starved to death.
I don't know a lot about starvation.
I didn't deal with it a lot as a Detective.
I was hoping you could take me through what a body would go through when they're starved to death.
The first phase is kind of where you become disoriented, delirious, weak.
You may actually have to hold onto a wall while you're walking up stairs.
The second phase is going to be your heart rate is gonna drop dramatically.
As things progress, there is a point where your organs are actually cannibalizing themselves.
Man, this is some kind of pain.
I feel like I'm gonna explode, like your head and your face and chest are going to explode.
Your heart weight can actually decrease by a third of its weight.
Your liver can decrease by half.
I feel like my ribs are collapsing, or my lungs.
Oh, my God, it hurts.
The muscles between your ribs and your diaphragm.
.
They're shrinking.
Well, there's this pressure.
.
Aah! You know, and then he's fighting to breathe, to live.
In the end, you actually asphyxiate, because those muscles just stop working.
Just feels like I'm drowning.
This pain is running through me everywhere.
I've never felt anything like it.
.
Almost like drowning, but without the water.
From here up, it's just like.
.
And it hurts so (Bleep) bad.
It hurts, it hurts.
People will actually, um, let out these primitive, uttural screams.
Just the act of breathing becomes a tremendous effort.
It's a horrible death.
I don't think that's the way I would want to die.
That was really, really horrible.
Definitely not a good way to die.
Why did they do this? Linda Hazzard was obviously a sick woman by any standards.
Her treatments were unscientific torture sessions where dozens of people died in agony.
I need to know what happened to her once she got arrested.
I'm meeting with a legal expert who's familiar with the case to find out what happened.
Linda Hazzard was charged with first-degree murder by the Kitsap County, um, District Attorney.
She was a very strong woman who could control and influence anyone around her.
If you came under her spell, you did what she said.
So, Ron, she's charged with first-degree murder and she goes to trial.
What happened? Uh, the jury convicted her of second-degree murder, and the reason they couldn't find her guilty of first degree is the jury did not find that it was premeditated.
Linda Hazzard was ultimately pardoned by the governor on a deal that she had to leave the state.
Theoretically, she wasn't supposed to have patients any more, but she came back here, started a health school of some kind.
She sets up shop again, basically, - and nobody says nothing? - It was in the wilderness, okay? No one knows what's going on there, but several people died over the next, uh, decade or so.
And she was never brought to trial again for anything? Never charged.
- What ended up happening to her? - That's kind of ironic.
In 1938.
.
She, uh, died of her own treatment.
Was that the cause of death for her? Was it starvation? Starvation, yes.
I'm having a little bit of a hard time.
.
Wanting to connect with this person.
Their body feels small to me, smallish, like, fragile, like, small-boned, like, small.
.
Like a small frame.
(Bleep) this hurts, man.
Oh, my God, it's so awful.
I would like to sketch a lady that I met.
She is very, very angry.
- Depressed, and in a lot of pain.
- Okay.
How about under the eyes? A little, like, fuller and rounder.
- Lower lip, very thin? - Mm-hmm.
And how about her neck? It was short and thin.
Is this the person you saw? Yes.
After completing each of our investigations separately, Amy and I are meeting in the house where Linda Hazzard kept her victims.
Here, we'll reveal our findings to our clients and each other for the first time.
Logan is 18 years old, and he's been having some weird encounters here.
This is Logan's Dad, Shane.
Hi, nice to meet you.
So with that, Amy, can you tell us a little bit about your walk? One of the initial things that I got was there are a lot of dead people in this house, in a lot of pain.
A lot of victims were, like, touching base with me.
And I was looking at the house, and it reminded me of when homeless living people will squat at a location.
This is, like, a place for dead squatters, and this is inadvertently holding them there.
They should just tear this (Bleep) down.
- You.
.
You got that all here? - Yes.
Do me a favor.
Logan, explain to her what you hear at night.
Yes.
Um, down in my room, as well as over in this house, it sounds like there's a group of people, and they're all trying to say something at one time, and I can't make out what they're saying because they're all talking at once.
You guys know some of the history here.
There was a quack Doctor that actually lived in this house by the name of Linda Hazzard.
There was 20 to 40 people that we know of that were murdered here.
She ran an alternative medicine type of a place where she used different therapies instead of modern medicine to try to cure people of whatever disease they had.
In her process, she killed quite a few.
She starved her patients to death.
What? Well, that's how she thought she was gonna cure whatever ailed them.
Wow, okay.
She killed a lot.
She had hundreds of patients.
Some of them were kids.
So this.
.
There was a lot of death in this house.
There's so many people, and they're still dying.
What do you mean by that? They're stuck in their death state.
So they're constantly feeling how they died.
They just feel that all the time.
What else were you getting on your walk? I kept getting the sensation of drowning.
Drowning? Yeah.
I felt like I couldn't breathe.
I felt like my head and my chest were gonna explode.
What you're describing sounds like starvation.
I interviewed a.
.
A pathologist, and a lot of what you're saying are the same symptoms.
Your organs cannibalize themselves.
What happens is the muscles around your ribcage shrink - and your diaphragm.
.
- Contracts.
You can't breathe.
He said, also, your esophagus shuts down.
- You can't swallow.
- Oh, my gosh.
So that could sound like drowning because of the symptoms, like, you can't breathe and you can't catch your breath.
Well, there's this pressure.
He's fighting to breathe, to live.
One of the people that.
.
I actually got to really communicate with.
.
Was this woman.
Um, she's really, really angry.
I felt like she had fallen down the stairs and she felt, like, pressured to do it.
Um, so there was some kind of weird situation going on there.
You know, it sounds like two sisters that were here.
Claire and Dora Williamson.
They were two sisters.
That came in around 1911.
.
For treatment.
Which entailed starvation.
This was Dora just prior to coming out here.
.
And this is what she looked like when they came and rescued her.
Oh, my God.
Claire wind up not making it.
Linda Hazzard separated them, uh, so they wouldn't see each other.
Uh, she tried to manipulate them for their money, because they were wealthy.
They were British heiresses.
Matter of fact, even at the trial, when Linda Hazzard was arrested, Dora had said that Linda and the staff here tried to tell her to commit suicide.
So Claire, the older sister, dies of starvation.
Well, you know what? - She did her own autopsies, this woman.
- What? Yeah, they'd have every kind of disease but starvation as cause of death.
Cirrhosis of the liver was what was written down for Claire.
She called herself a Doctor.
She was a frickin' psycho murderer.
.
- Yeah.
- Is what she was.
She was getting off on, you know, torturing these people.
A lot of the victims are out front.
.
And you feel it.
I did do a sketch of the woman that I saw.
Okay, let's take a look at it.
I did do a sketch of - the woman that I saw, who fell.
.
- Oh, so it was a woman - you did the sketch of? - Fell down the stairs, yeah.
Okay, let's take a look at it.
According to Amy, she sketched the woman who fell down the stairs, which sounds a lot like the sister who died here, but to me, this sketch looks just like someone else.
I know it sounds like it may be Claire, but.
.
I don't know.
It looks.
.
This is Linda Hazzard.
This is the psycho Doctor.
- Oh.
- I mean, look at the nose.
I think it's.
.
It's really close.
To me, that's pretty spot-on.
So why would it look like Linda, but act like one of the victims? So there's two possibilities as to why she's taking on characteristics of one of her victims.
In one scenario, she could be doing penance.
Um, in having to experience all of the pain and.
.
Emotions and, to some extent, their lives.
The other possibility is that she's feeding.
And she feeds off of them, so she pulls their energy.
And.
.
So she can sustain herself.
This person feels trapped.
She blames the living for being trapped here.
I think she's trying to do harm to someone who's here.
She has targeted, um, a female.
In the other house.
She's trying to figure out the best method to.
.
Inducing this person to fall down the stairs.
This is what always amazes me about Amy.
No one's told her that Logan's Mother lives here, but she knew anyway.
What else happened during the walk? I got very upset at one point.
I got the information that someone was trying to communicate with the dead here, and in doing so, had contributed to trapping them here.
This is the (Bleep) that (Bleep) pisses me off.
Oh, why don't you talk to me, why don't you talk to me? Come on and talk to me.
I get very angry.
Logan conducted 17 séances in this house.
He thinks he might have caused this, so he thinks he inadvertently started something he can't finish.
I feel bad that I.
.
That I sort of stirred things up, because I had no idea what it would.
.
What it would do.
I feel.
.
I feel guilty for.
.
Maybe setting these things in motion.
You have to understand, like, when you're doing things like that, it actually puts them in more physical pain.
So.
.
Maybe you're communicating with, you know, these people, um, and yeah, we want to get rid of them and all of that.
Um, but the victims are in already a state of confusion, and when you do that, it causes them more pain, like, physical pain.
The victims are still in their death state, and they died here.
They're not going anywhere.
She's feeding off of them so that she can become mobile and do whatever the heck she wants to do, and what does she want to do more than anything? She wants to kill.
Yeah.
And she feels, for whatever reason, the attraction to.
.
Your wife and your Mother is her intended victim.
And that's her goal right now.
This is her path, and she's a murderer.
Listen, it's clear how serious this situation is.
Um, the question is now, is how do you undo it? Um, for that, Amy's gonna have to answer that.
So there's a lot of different things here.
The house.
.
Why is it still here? Um, because I've been taking pieces from it to use to finish the house next door.
By getting rid of this house.
.
You will be releasing, so many people.
The victims.
.
Will be able to.
.
Detach.
And, granted, it's not gonna be a wonderful process for them, but it's a process that they've needed to go through for, like, a hundred years or something.
So they'll detach from the house, they'll detach from her, and they'll start to go through their death process, so they'll actually go beyond just being in that physical pain of just dying.
I've encountered a lot of dead who attach themselves to a property, or a part of a house, but this case is different.
The dead are connected to the structure itself.
Tearing it down should help most of them to move on.
As far as you're concerned.
.
You need to step out of the paranormal for now.
So I'm getting from what you're saying that you think he's a sensitive.
Yeah.
I think we've thought that he's been sensitive for a long time.
You know, because so much of this has happened to him - more than anybody else.
- Anybody else, right.
- Knocking off the séance nonsense.
.
- Yes.
Is the first step.
I mean, this is not a game, especially when she's talking - about your Mom maybe being in danger.
- Yeah.
- Do not play games with this.
- Definitely.
Shane, tell me the truth.
Are you gonna listen to Amy and tear this structure down? Well, I'm gonna tear it down, for sure.
It's definitely coming down.
How do you feel about that? N.
.
Now that I know what is happening, I think it should go.
Okay.
Although the solution may sound extreme, Logan and his family face a lot of obstacles if they want to keep living here.
I really hope they follow my advice so that both they and the dead can find some peace.

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